Hard choice: A game for balancing strategy for agility

This poster presents the educational Hard Choices board game that simulates design decision process to communicate the concepts of design strategies in the face of uncertainty. At the end of the game, players experience the implications of investing effort to gain an advantage or paying a price to take shortcuts during software development in the race to become market leader. The game has been played in academic and industrial contexts, in several countries around the world, and is available to the community under a creative commons license. 1. Objectives Having a common understanding of the structure of a software system is essential for guiding the development effort, meeting customer needs, focusing improvement efforts, and maintaining the software over its lifetime. Having disciplined project management that assures working software that delivers its intended customer needs while having the agility to respond to change are critical for success. Yet, how to use architecture-centric practices with agile software development techniques isn’t obvious when it comes to large scale projects. The purpose of this game is to give participants a better understanding of the strategies they employ during software development and the implications of investing effort to gain an advantage or paying a price to take shortcuts as observed in balancing agility and architecture centric techniques [1]. In particular the expected learning outcomes are: • How to discuss technical debt and investments in a project and business context • How to assess changing conditions relative to technical debt, costs, short and long-term • How individual and collective strategies change as projects progress • How to expose students, who might not have practical experience, to the required tradeoffs and dynamic nature of real-world software development